Silicon Valley tech workers are talking about starting their first union in 2017 to defeat Trump Quartz

"In the last few weeks, interest and curiosity in unions and labor organizing has definitely ramped up," said an organizer of the Tech Workers Coalition, a grass-roots activist group founded in 2015, with members from Silicon Valley's largest companies.

Tech Solidarity, a grass-roots organization for tech workers, founded last November, has made it one of their core objectives.

"We live in this place where we want to save the world," says Optimizely software engineer Brad Taylor, whose Facebook post urging tech workers to organize went viral in late January, leading to the formation of Tech Against Trump.

A professional approach to organizing Silicon Valley unions are already scoring victories, at least among blue-collar workers.

Three thousand security guards at Facebook, Cisco, and Genentech led the largest private sector organizing effort in the Silicon Valley in January, said the Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West.

Will it work for software engineers? "I think it's not only not crazy, it makes a lot of sense," says Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, a pro-labor think tank in Washington DC. Although labor union membership peaked in 1954 at 35% of US workers, sinking to just 10.7% of the workforce today, there is a bright spot in the data: professional workers.